My Sacred Path of the Amoeba

Digesting and Discerning Truth

Originally Posted on April 1, 2017 in Living with OPen Hands 1.0

If a person says that my statement is judgmental, isn’t THAT being judgmental? Am I being judgmental by asking this question???

Why do we so often judge others and their ideas? What do we fear? Why do we need to set things straight right then and right there?

What is true anyway? Well, it depends on each person’s perspective. 10 people can see the same situation and come away with 10 different descriptions of that same situation.

Do I need to be right?  Does truth need to be “defended”? Why?

Can it not stand on its own? Usually we “defend” the weak and vulnerable from being hurt or destroyed? Is that what we think about truth? Is it our duty to defend the truth? If we do not defend it, then it will melt away or become a victim of an overpowering idea?

What is the source of our constant argumentation? Why do we cut ourselves short of understanding another? What do we fear? Being wrong? Not being right? Being different? Being the same?

We spend our lives quibbling facts and disputing words without bothering to understand what it is we are disputing and quibbling about... or why.

Do we even want to understand another? Are we afraid of their difference? Are we afraid of our own ideas crumbling, or crashing down around us, or melting away?

Understanding requires the effort and the intention to understand.

Understanding requires the effort and the intention of listening.

Why is it so hard to listen?

We cannot listen

• • Over our chattering mind

• • Over our need to be right

• • If we are busy formulating our response

• • If we already think we know what the person is going to say

• • If we judge the person’s words and ideas
• 
  
• If we are busy labeling right or wrong

The Virus of the Mind; a mental health pandemic

Am I my own Crap Detector?

Or am I spreading the Virus of the Mind?

The coronavirus is a physical example of what is happening in our minds and spreading throughout society. It is scary, destructive, and deadly. We are all seeing this physical virus tear through humanity, no matter the gender, race, beliefs, culture, religion, politics, age, or economic status. And yet there are people that still deny its impact or the seriousness of this pandemic. Even as hundreds and thousands of people are dying, far away on the other side of the world (out of sight, out of mind), it is just a hoax. Even though the experts in the field have been saying for years that we must be vigilant and prepare now, we think it is a joke, or a conspiracy to undermine the American presidential election. Oh yeah, that's why people are dying in China!?!? This world wide pandemic is all about the US president??? And it is whose fault???

And yet, in the midst of all of our denials, there is a virus that is

much much more destructive than COVID 19. It is the VIRUS OF THE MIND. Not only does this virus destroy our concept of reality and truth, it is also reframing our thinking about the coronavirus; i.e. its reality and truth. If you hear someone tell you enough that something is a hoax, eventually, if you are not vigilant, you will shift your perception of reality to this alternative reality. That's what the virus of the mind, i.e. meme, does. There are many types of memes. Some are good like "Love Your Neighbor" or "Be the Change" or "Treat Others Like You Want to Be Treated." Others are innocuous like "Go Tigers" or "I'm Fine." Others are very destructive and lead us away from the good and the truth like "Those Democrats..." or "Those Republicans..." or "White people are Racist" or "Black people are Lazy" along with other biases, prejudices, insults, and name calling. These can be religious, political, cultural, etc. And they can create love or fear, peace or hatred, truth or lies.

What is true? What is real? How can I know? How can I learn to discern what I hear so I can know what to believe. It is you and me that must develop our own internal mechanisms for sorting out truth from untruth, fake from real, propaganda from reality. Each of us must find ways to create our own “crap detector”; a personal fact checker that believes nothing that we have been told. Everything we hear must be vetted by experience and researched in this time from reliable sources. We live in a time of so much information blasting us that we can conjure up any world of our making just by the perception we choose to take. Information overload fosters this even though it is not new. It has always been true that hostile people live in a hostile world and loving people live in a loving world. But HERE and NOW, it is more true than ever in history.

Facts and truth are spinning out of control in this day and age. 

Truth, Wisdom, Meaning

The search for truth

The search for wisdom

The search for meaning

… out there somewhere?

or...

The discovery of truth

The discovery of wisdom

The discovery of meaning

… deep in our bones?

Truth, Wisdom, and Meaning are very important words for me. But I find myself using them interchangeably and also using them without a very clear understanding of what they mean, their depth of meaning, and how to use them in a more distinguishable or distinctive way, i.e. unique from each other. This is my attempt.

“We attain wisdom not by creating ideals but by learning to see things clearly, as they are.” (Jack Kornfield)

“The first revolution is when you change your mind about how you look at things and see that there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown” (Gil Scott-Heron)

Discover the truth wherever it may be found.

Refine the truth through the fire of inner discernment.

Follow the truth wherever it may lead you.

Blind Spot

Everyday, I must ask myself,

What is my Source? From what inner place am I living my life?

(Source of the River Cuervo, Cuenca Province, Spain)

”The best in art and life comes from a center – something urgent and powerful, an idea or emotion that insists on its being. From that insistence, a shape emerges and creates its structure out of passion. If you begin with a structure, you have to make up the passion, and that’s very hard to do.” (Roger Rosenblatt)

“The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.”

Two people can act or interact or react in the same way in similar situations BUT the results are never the same. Because what really matters is the interior condition, the motivation, the intention, the Source from which each person is acting. One person can say something to someone and they become outraged. Another person can say something very similar and they are comforted. It is not so much what we say or do or even how we say it or do it. What matters is why we say and do the things that we do. 

What is the Source of my attention and of my intention?

My most basic intention of writing is to shine a spotlight of awareness on my blind spot; the place from which my attention and intention originates and emanates; my interior condition, my source. I need to remember this each and every day; because through lack of consciousness, lack of awareness, by default this is the human blind spot.

What we do and how we do what we do are small matters compared to our state of being, our presence, our mindfulness, that engulfs the why of what we do and how we do what we do. This is our Source.

Oh love that fires the sun, keep me burning.

If Only . . .

If Only I Could …

I spent most of my life strutting around, touting the answers, thinking I know. 

Then life flattened me, uprooting everything, including all those so-called answers.

Learning to live the questions completely changed the trajectory of my life in such an aggravating and life-giving way.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers. . . . Live the questions now.” (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

If only I could …

Think like everyone thinks.
Believe what everyone believes.
Be like everyone else.

… but that’s not the shape of my heart

If only I could …

Not think, not care about what is real and true.

Be oblivious to the cognitive dissonance screaming in my head and heart.

Ignore the dissonance of the difference between what is real and the lifetime of fictions in my head.

Live in a box, a container of conditioning full of that which I’ve been told all of my life.

Live in a cocoon, all snug and warm, comfortable and secure, and so nicely certain.

Believe what I was told to believe, that system of beliefs that is delivered to your door predetermined primarily by zip codes, comfort zones, and religious and social bubbles.

Download the myths and mores of culture and automatically accept them and believe, conforming to this world.

Shrink the dimensions of my mind back to what it was before it expanded to see, feel, and understand a whole new paradigm and a whole new world.

Unsee the depth and breadth and richness that I have been shown once I let go of dogma.

… but that’s not the shape of my heart

Contentment or Satisfaction

There is a big difference between

satisfaction and contentment. 

Being satisfied is when you

get/achieve what you want! 

Being content is being happy

even if you don't get/achieve

what you want!

Satisfaction is conditional and hence transitory and fleeting.
Satisfaction is dependent on accumulation of what we want.
This desire requires a state of frenzied pursuit.
This pursuit is based on scarcity and discontent,
the belief that we never have enough,
that we are needy, in dire straights, and always need more.

Contentment is based on peace, an unconditional state of being.
Contentment is permanent and perpetual since it is not based on circumstance.
When peace is at the center of being, it is lasting, everlasting.
Being at the center, it can be returned to perpetually.
This peace is always here and available,
Always here and now,
A perpetual fountain of life tapped into our infinite Source

I have often wondered why it is so popular or even imperative that people go on vacations. Why not create a place to live where we feel at home, where we belong, so that there is no need for more and more and more? The only way to do that is to live more simply and learn to be content, knowing that we are exactly where we are meant to be.

Through Alien Eyes

“Thus it may be that, for a few moments, or hours, or even days, we can enter into the heart and head and body of another culture. We will always return to our own world, for that is where our roots lie. Nevertheless, on our reentry we may be changed in some subtle yet important way. And, sometimes when we spend time living within that other culture, we are able to look back upon our own world and see it through alien eyes, appreciate its limitations as well as its beauty and attraction.” (F. David Peate, Blackfoot Physics)

Since childhood, I’ve practiced this exercise. Stepping out of myself and looking back on this world as if I’d never seen it before. As a child, I thought it was just part of being rather “different” or weird in my outlook on life. Often I would lay on the ground, looking into the sky while placing myself in the shoes of some alien looking down, and imagine what is being seen from such a perspective. Now I see it as a gift . . . although not a “nice” or “easy” gift. Actually, sometimes this gift can feel like a curse.

Stepping outside and looking back in is something I’ve been compelled to do, not something I’ve chosen to do. It would be easier to settle into my culture, my environment, and only see what is right there in my face. It would be easier to not see things from a different perspective, and just accept “what is”. Stepping outside and looking back in brings forth the ugliness that is “normally” overlooked. AND it can also show forth the beauty that is often taken for granted.

Through alien eyes, what do I see?

I see a human race reduced to a rat race.

I see the human race as a destructive race; developing and using it’s best technology to kill its own.

I see the meaninglessness of our striving after the wind.

I see endless, thoughtless routine filling our lives with busyness.

I see the vanity of fashion and beauty.

I see lives lived with no thought of tomorrow, of others, of suffering, or of injustice.

I see lives lived only thinking of and caring for self.